“Remarkable sentiment for an heiress. However. If Mr. Gebert should marry you, that would be a job for him. Let us abandon him to that slim hope for his redemption. It is getting on for four o’clock, when I must leave you. I need to ask you about a sentence you left unfinished yesterday, shortly after I made my unsuccessful appeal to you. You told me that your father died when you were only a few months old, and that therefore you had never had a father, and then you said, ‘That is,’ and stopped. I prodded you, but you said it was nothing, and we let it go at that. It may in fact be nothing, but I would like to have it — whatever was ready for your tongue. Do you remember?”
She nodded. “It really was nothing. Just something foolish.”
“Let me have it. I’ve told you, we’re combing a meadow for a mustard seed.”
“But this was nothing at all. Just a dream, a childish dream I had once. Then I had it several times after that, always the same. A dream about myself...”
“Tell me.”
“Well... the first time I had it I was about six years old, in Bali. I’ve wondered since if anything had happened that day to make me have such a dream, but I couldn’t remember anything. I dreamed I was a baby, not an infant but big enough to walk and run, around two I imagine, and on a chair, on a napkin, there was an orange that had been peeled and divided into sections. I took a section of the orange and ate it, then took another one and turned to a man sitting there on a bench, and handed it to him, and I said plainly, ‘For daddy.’ It was my voice, only it was a baby talking. Then I ate another section, and then took another one and said ‘For daddy’ again, and kept on that way till it was all gone. I woke up from the dream trembling and began to cry. Mother was sleeping in another bed — it was on a screened veranda — and she came to me and asked what was the matter, and I said, ‘I’m crying because I feel so good.’ I never did tell her what the dream was. I had it quite a few times after that — I think the last time was when I was about eleven years old, here in New York. I always cried when I had it.”
Wolfe asked, “What did the man look like?”
She shook her head. “That’s why it was just foolish. It wasn’t a man, it just looked like a man. There was one photograph of my father which mother had kept, but I couldn’t tell if it looked like him in the dream. It just... I just simply called it daddy.”
“Indeed.” Wolfe’s lips pushed out and in. At length he observed, “Possibly remarkable, on account of the specific picture. Did you eat sections of orange when you were young?”
“I suppose so. I’ve always liked oranges.”